Contact
by reminiscent-afterthought
Summary: They'd had the choice of avoiding contact forever but it was a necessity, even if they didn't really understand at first.


**A/N:** Written for the Diversity Writing Challenge, c32 - write a fic that explores metaphysics.

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 **Contact**

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They wonder why Naoya wants no-one to touch him. They wonder why he shies away from everybody but his brother - the brother even they, the parents, fear.

And why not? He'd made them bleed more times than he cared to count, more times than they could bear to remember. Even though they told themselves he couldn't help such things... It wasn't any easier to bear. They tried to smile. They tried to keep the world together, but it wouldn't stay. Naoya was their last hope. Naoya was causing the churning liquid to rise to boiling point.

Cute, little Naoya. Naoto doted on him so. He never got hurt in those little angry bursts of - whatever it was that caused all the windows to shake and the toys to move on their own and their noses to bleed when he glared at them like even an adult couldn't glare. And Naoya loved his brother. Whenever he cried, it was Naoto he cried for. Whenever he squirmed, it was Naoto he squirmed towards.

They, those poor parents, never realised it: that the reason Naoya squirmed away from them was because he heard their whispering thoughts and emotions in his head. He heard how they feared their other son, how they feared for him - and for a young child, fear was an unpalatable thing. So he squirmed away from them and reached for Naoto who didn't invite those whispering thoughts to his head. Naoto whose head was clear - and why it was clear, they never did find out when every other mind in the world had something in it.

But not every one of them hurt. He worked it out eventually, after old man Misaki had whisked them away, after their parents had abandoned them. Most of the workers there were like their parents: afraid, putting up with it because they had to but in the workers' cases, it was because they were paid well for the job. Their parents lost money instead.

Though they weren't to blame for that misfortune. It was other people, the despicible kind that made Naoya shudder in his brother's embrace and stare wild-eyed and twitch in nightmares for days until the memories of what his touch had brought could fade away. But there were truly kind people as well, and they met them: soft minds who spoke of honesty, and love, and trust.

Naoya could trust people like that. Naoto did as well, because he knew what his brother's touch could unleash and if it brought a smile, then there wasn't a speck of anything ugly in that soul. Because he remembered the times his brother screamed for hours long, the times his brother's eyes stared sightlessly at nothing for days, so lost they were in the horror's of another's mind.

He never did work out how to protect himself from that. Others, to some extent, did. Like Naota always being there. Naota searching for the lock when things happened, trying to twist the nightmare into a fairytale with a happy ending to be seen. And that little girl who'd drawn the picture that rescued him from the fire in his future dream... So it wasn't that he shied away from them all. How could he? He needed them.

But people like his parents, filled with fear. People like the dregs of society they always seemed to run in to, filled with things a young boy should never have seen but he saw them anyway - and yet, so many years later, they were still horrifying to behold. Maybe because he'd never experienced it for himself. Maybe because, at least some of those things, he never would - because he'd already met one girl he could touch without screaming in horror and she'd passed from their plane, transcended into something without even a physical form for him to touch again. And he'd seen enough blood spilt, by everyone - even the brother with the clear mind - to want to ever spill it himself.

Even if he could muster up the want, that man had stomped on it, ironically in his attempt to light the fuel.

But others. Contact. Naoya had no protection against it except the clothes on his back, and even then not so much. Sometimes walking down the street was a chore. A brushed shoulder or a stubbed toe carried with them a mental hurt no-one save his brother seemed to know. It was no wonder then he withdrew, hid in his room and let his brother do the shopping and the outdoor things while he peered into his dreams, the one thing that not even total seclusion could spare him from.

And where would the world be if it could? Those dreams had saved the world more times than the world itself would know. It had saved more lives than even they knew - but they'd seen a lot of horror because of those dreams too.

Still, no matter how much either of them would like it, they couldn't tuck themselves and each other away from the world. In an ironic twist of fate, Naoto was the one to dream that: the consequence of seclusion in the midst of a dream of his own future. A nightmare, rather, but it had made the truth clear for him. It made a sort of truth clear for the both of them. The world needed them, as much as it forsook them on the side.

The world needed them...and, in a way, they needed the world as well. Even the fear their parents had addressed them with, the hatred in the eyes of those who had their secrets - their dirty souls - exposed. They needed that as well. Their grounding lead, perhaps. The balance for the happiness, the contentment, they shared in their company together. Otherwise they would have tucked themselves away in an otherwise untouched corner of the world - but they couldn't do that. And neither of them could imagine a life like that, nor accept it.

Because they'd had the opportunity to transcend it all and escape into the fabric of time. A world where they would never be touched again: not by happiness, not by sadness and doubt and fear and hate... Not by anything at all.

But they chose otherwise. On the surface, they claimed it to be because they would also lose each other. More deeply, and more simply, it was the sense of "other" they would lose: the necessity that company was, that tethered them to the world they lived in.


End file.
